Love is much nicer to be in than an automobile accident, a tight girdle, a higher tax bracket or a holding pattern over Philadelphia. ~ Judith Viorst, Redbook, 1975

Love is the magician that pulls man out of his own hat. ~ Ben Hecht

Love is an irresistible desire to be irresistibly desired. ~ Robert Frost

Like I’ve always said, love wouldn’t be blind if the Braille weren’t so damned much fun. ~ Armistead Maupin, Maybe the Moon

The lover is a monotheist who knows that other people worship different gods but cannot himself imagine that there could be other gods. ~ Theodor Reik

Love is metaphysical gravity. ~ R. Buckminster Fuller

If I love you, what business is it of yours? ~ Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

Love is the wisdom of the fool and the folly of the wise. ~ Samuel Johnson

A husband is what’s left of a sweetheart after the nerve has been killed. ~ Lou Costello

It seems there are two possible ways love has developed from the beginning of time until now: either it is a universal passed down to us from the first generations – the passion of Adam for Eve – or it is a cultural manifestation of lust, a kind of expressive outpouring that, if it roils the soul, does so only in the ways that our hearts have lately been conditioned. The question of love’s universality is not only unanswerable but untranslatable, lost in the slippage between our understanding of the English word “love” and the meanings of the Greeks’ eros, agape, philia and storge, the various Latinate iterations of amor, Hebrew’s ahava and other near cognates of diverse languages and epochs. ~ Miriam Markowitz

I wanted to make it really special on Valentine’s Day – so I tied my boyfriend up. And for three solid hours I watched whatever I wanted on TV. ~ Tracy Smith

About This Site

This site offers a daily column on current events, and unlike other blogs, in long form. Short posts pointing to this and that and saying "Oh my!" seems a bit lazy. Columns here are an attempt to think things through. If you'd like to come along for the ride, fine. If you have neither the time nor patience for that, that is also fine - you can click on the LINKS tab at the top of the page and visit the sites that offer quick hits. Those provide the raw material for the analyses here.

The views here are mine alone, save for the occasional column from Ric in Paris or comments from key readers, like Rick, the News Guy in Atlanta, and others.

Commentary and guest columns are posted here, but there is a sister site, Just Above Sunset Photography, where images are far more important than words. That site is updated daily. Take a look.

JUST ABOVE SUNSET has been online, in various formats, since May 2003. Click on the ABOUT tab at the top of the page for more on that, and a note on who I am.